What if unemployment jumps enough to trigger the Sahm rule?
A 0.5pt unemployment jump trips the Sahm rule; the cleanest expression is credit spreads widening and financials/high-beta crypto leading lower as recession odds drain risk appetite. The Aug-2024 Sahm trigger plus yen-carry unwind is the live analogue — VIX spiked to ~65 intraday, Nasdaq and BTC sold off hard before recovering. Forward angle: Sahm has fired on supply-driven labor-force growth this cycle, so the recession signal carries more false-positive risk than history implies.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 6–18 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. US unemployment jumps 0.5pt, triggering the Sahm-rule recession signal. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Recession signal ▲ · Growth surprise ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.